The Coddling of the American Mind

8/15/2019 The Coddling of the American Mind

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TheCoddlingof the

mericanMind

4 2 S E P T E M B E R T H E A T L A N T I C

In the name of emotional well-being, college students areincreasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they

don’t like, and seeking punishment of those who give evenaccidental offense. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—

and likely to worsen mental health on campus.

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan HaidtPhotographs by Andrew B. Myers


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44 S E P T E M B E R T H E A T L A N T I C

system schools were presented by administrators at facultyleader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions.The list of offensive statements included: “America is theland of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified personshould get the job.”

The press has typically described these developments asa resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, al-though there are important differences between what’s hap-pening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. Thatmovement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech

aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the liter-ary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it byincluding more-diverse perspectives. The current movementis largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it pre-sumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, andtherefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psycho-logical harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campusesinto “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from wordsand ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than thelast, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interfereswith that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulsevindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which every-

one must think twice before speaking up, lest they face chargesof insensitivity, aggression, or worse.

S is happen-ing at America’s colleges and uni-versities. A movement is arising,undirected and driven largely bystudents, to scrub campuses cleanof words, ideas, and subjects that

might cause discomfort or give offense. Last Decem-ber, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The NewYorker about law students asking her fellow professors

at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, evenuse the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lestit cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, aprofessor at Northwestern University, wrote an essayin The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a newcampus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then sub- jected to a long investigation after students who wereoffended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filedTitle IX complaints against her. In June, a professorprotecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essayfor Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach.

“I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students

Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popularcomedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped per-forming on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’sarticle on page 54). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher havepublicly condemned the oversensitivity of collegestudents, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity intocommon campus parlance. Microaggressions are smallactions or word choices that seem on their face tohave no malicious intent but that are thought of as akind of violence nonetheless. For example, by somecampus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask anAsian American or Latino American “Where were youborn?,” because this implies that he or she is not a realAmerican. Trigger warnings are alerts that professorsare expected to issue if something in a course might cause astrong emotional response. For example, some students havecalled for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart de-scribes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The GreatGatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that studentswho have been previously victimized by racism or domesticviolence can choose to avoid these works, which they believemight “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April,at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association

sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asiansthrough an installation on the steps of an academic hall. Theinstallation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’tyou supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’tsee race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian Americanstudents, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression.The association removed the installation, and its presidentwrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to any-one who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the micro-aggressions.”

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and isaffecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for

discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, thedeans and department chairs at the 10 University of California


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We have been studying this development fora while now, with rising alarm. (Greg Lukianoffis a constitutional lawyer and the president andCEO of the Foundation for Individual Rightsin Education, which defends free speech andacademic freedom on campus, and has advo-cated for students and faculty involved in manyof the incidents this article describes; JonathanHaidt is a social psychologist who studies the

American culture wars. The stories of how weeach came to this subject can be read in thesidebars on pages 47 and 49.) The dangersthat these trends pose to scholarship and tothe quality of American universities are signif-icant; we could write a whole essay detailingthem. But in this essay we focus on a differentquestion: What are the effects of this new pro-tectiveness on the students themselves? Does itbenefit the people it is supposed to help? Whatexactly are students learning when they spendfour years or more in a community that polices

unintentional slights, places warning labels onworks of classic literature, and in many otherways conveys the sense that words can beforms of violence that require strict control bycampus authorities, who are expected to act asboth protectors and prosecutors?

There’s a saying common in education cir-cles: Don’t teach students what to think; teachthem how to think. The idea goes back at least asfar as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socraticmethod is a way of teaching that fosters criti-cal thinking, in part by encouraging studentsto question their own unexamined beliefs, aswell as the received wisdom of those aroundthem. Such questioning sometimes leads to

discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a

very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life,which often demands intellectual engagement with peopleand ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm maybe more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policingspeech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patternsof thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identifiedby cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression andanxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to

think pathologically.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s dificult to know exactly why vindictive protectivenesshas burst forth so powerfully in the past few years. The phe-nomenon may be related to recent changes in the interpreta-tion of federal antidiscrimination statutes (about which morelater). But the answer probably involves generational shiftsas well. Childhood itself has changed greatly during the pastgeneration. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers can rememberriding their bicycles around their hometowns, unchaperonedby adults, by the time they were 8 or 9 years old. In the hours

after school, kids were expected to occupy themselves, gettinginto minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But

T H E A T L A N T I C S E P T E M B E R 4 5

“free range” childhood became less common in the 1980s. Thesurge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s made BabyBoomer parents more protective than their own parents hadbeen. Stories of abducted children appeared more frequentlyin the news, and in 1984, images of them began showing up onmilk cartons. In response, many parents pulled in the reins andworked harder to keep their children safe.

The flight to safety also happened at school. Dangerousplay structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter

was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbinemassacre in Colorado, many schools cracked down on bullying,implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In a variety of ways,children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistentmessage from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do every-thing in their power to protect you from harm, not just fromstrangers but from one another as well.

These same children grew up in a culture that was (andstill is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans andDemocrats have never particularly liked each other, but sur-vey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, theirmutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings

have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since theearly 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affectivepartisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for anydemocracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other,compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows thatimplicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong acrosspolitical parties as they are across races.

So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campustoday might be more desirous of protection and more hostiletoward ideological opponents than in generations past. Thishostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisanemotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade.A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds andblinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgmentsis express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with ourability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’sviewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see youas a traitor.

Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades,express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebookwas founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed childrenas young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of studentswho spent all their teen years using Facebook reached collegein 2011, and graduated from college only this year.

These first true “social-media natives” may be different

from members of previous generations in how they go aboutsharing their moral judgments and supporting one another inmoral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like aboutthese trends; young people today are engaged with one another,with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater de-gree than when the dominant technology was television. Butsocial media has also fundamentally shifted the balance ofpower in relationships between students and faculty; the latterincreasingly fear what students might do to their reputationsand careers by stirring up online mobs against them.

We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates ofmental illness in young adults have been rising, both on cam-

pus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increaseis surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to


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from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previouslyfilled so much of their consciousness—they become less de-pressed, anxious, and angry.

The parallel to formal education is clear: cognitive behav-ioral therapy teaches good critical-thinking skills, the sortthat educators have striven for so long to impart. By almostany deinition, critical thinking requires grounding one’sbeliefs in evidence rather than in emotion or desire, andlearning how to search for and evaluate evidence that might

contradict one’s initial hypothesis. But does campus life todayfoster critical thinking? Or does it coax students to think inmore-distorted ways?

Let’s look at recent trends in higher education in light of thedistortions that cognitive behavioral therapy identifies. Wewill draw the names and descriptions of these distortions fromDavid D. Burns’s popular book Feeling Good, as well as from thesecond edition of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depres-sion and Anxiety Disorders, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Hol-land, and Lata K. McGinn.

Higher Education’s Embrace of

“Emotional Reasoning”Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your nega-tive emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘Ifeel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinndefine it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretationof reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not alwaystrustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lashout at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy ofteninvolves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your

emotional responses represents something true or important.Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates

and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offen-sive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feelingof offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speakerhas done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the

speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for com-mitting an offense.

There have always been some people who believe theyhave a right not to be offended. Yet throughout Americanhistory—from the Victorian era to the free-speech activismof the 1960s and ’70s—radicals have pushed boundaries andmocked prevailing sensibilities. Sometime in the 1980s, how-ever, college campuses began to focus on preventing offensivespeech, especially speech that might be hurtful to women orminority groups. The sentiment underpinning this goal waslaudable, but it quickly produced some absurd results.

Among the most famous early examples was the so-called

water-buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. In1993, the university charged an Israeli-born student with racial

seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portionof the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health di-rectors surveyed in 2013 by the American College CounselingAssociation reported that the number of students with severepsychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate ofemotional distress reported by students themselves is alsohigh, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American CollegeHealth Association, 54 percent of college students surveyedsaid that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12

months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five yearsearlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises;many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way univer-sity faculty and administrators interact with them. The ques-tion is whether some of those changes might be doing moreharm than good.

The Thinking CureFor millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t seelife as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, andother attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creationof our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you

deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins withthis insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, de-veloped practices for reducing attachments, thinking moreclearly, and finding release from the emotional torments ofnormal mental life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a modern embodiment ofthis ancient wisdom. It is the most extensively studied non-pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and is used widelyto treat depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and

addiction. It can even be of help to schizophrenics. No otherform of psychotherapy has been shown to work for a broaderrange of problems. Studies have generally found that it is aseffective as antidepressant drugs (such as Prozac) in the treat-ment of anxiety and depression. The therapy is relatively quickand easy to learn; after a few months of training, many patients

can do it on their own. Unlike drugs, cognitive behavioral ther-apy keeps working long after treatment is stopped, because itteaches thinking skills that people can continue to use.

The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see theworld more accurately. You start by learning the names of thedozen or so most common cognitive distortions (such as over-generalizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning;see the list in the sidebar on page 51). Each time you noticeyourself falling prey to one of them, you name it, describethe facts of the situation, consider alternative interpretations,and then choose an interpretation of events more in line withthose facts. Your emotions follow your new interpretation. In

time, this process becomes automatic. When people improvetheir mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves

According to the most-basic tenets of psychology,

helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the thingsthey fear is misguided.


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harassment after he yelled“Shut up, you water buffalo!”to a crowd of black soror-ity women that was makingnoise at night outside hisdorm-room window. Manyscholars and pundits at thetime could not see how theterm water buffalo (a rough

translation of a Hebrewinsult for a thoughtless orrowdy person) was a racialslur against African Ameri-cans, and as a result, the casebecame international news.

Claims of a right not tobe offended have continuedto arise since then, and uni-versities have continued toprivilege them. In a particu-larly egregious 2008 case, for

instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at India-napolis found a white studentguilty of racial harassmentfor reading a book titled

Notre Dame vs. the Klan. Thebook honored student op-position to the Ku Klux Klanwhen it marched on NotreDame in 1924. Nonetheless,the picture of a Klan rally onthe book’s cover offended atleast one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor aswell as a student), and thatwas enough for a guilty find-ing by the university’s Affi rmative Action Offi ce.

These examples may seem extreme, but the reasoningbehind them has become more commonplace on campusin recent years. Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, inMinnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have al-lowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Studentshad created a Facebook group where they protested the eventfor animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for beinginsensitive to people from the Middle East. The inspiration

for the camel had almost certainly come from a popular TVcommercial in which a camel saunters around an offi ce ona Wednesday, celebrating “hump day”; it was devoid of anyreference to Middle Eastern peoples. Nevertheless, the grouporganizing the event announced on its Facebook page that theevent would be canceled because the “program [was] divid-ing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possiblyunsafe environment.”

Because there is a broad ban in academic circles on “blam-ing the victim,” it is generally considered unacceptable to ques-tion the reasonableness (let alone the sincerity) of someone’semotional state, particularly if those emotions are linked to

one’s group identity. The thin argument “I’m offended” be-comes an unbeatable trump card. This leads to what Jonathan

T H E A T L A N T I C S E P T E M B E R 47

Rauch, a contributing editor at this magazine, calls the “offend-edness sweepstakes,” in which opposing parties use claims ofoffense as cudgels. In the process, the bar for what we considerunacceptable speech is lowered further and further.

Since 2013, new pressure from the federal government hasreinforced this trend. Federal antidiscrimination statutes reg-ulate on-campus harassment and unequal treatment based onsex, race, religion, and national origin. Until recently, the De-partment of Education’s Offi ce for Civil Rights acknowledged

that speech must be “objectively offensive” before it couldbe deemed actionable as sexual harassment—it would haveto pass the “reasonable person” test. To be prohibited, theoffi ce wrote in 2003, allegedly harassing speech would have togo “beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols orthoughts that some person finds offensive.”

But in 2013, the Departments of Justice and Educationgreatly broadened the definition of sexual harassment toinclude verbal conduct that is simply “unwelcome.” Out offear of federal investigations, universities are now applyingthat standard—defining unwelcome speech as harassment—not just to sex, but to race, religion, and veteran status as

well. Everyone is supposed to rely upon his or her own subjective feelings to decide whether a comment by a professor

GregLukianoff’sStory

IN THE WINTER of 2007–

08, I slipped into a deep

depression. I had struggled

with bouts of depression

my entire life, many of themquite severe, but this was

in a category by itself. I

could not shake the feeling

that any mistake I made

in my professional life—

anything short of complete

success—would mean ruin;

nightmare scenarios played

continually in my head.

In January 2008, after

I moved from Philadelphia

to New York City to be

surrounded by family and

friends, I started seeing a

therapist who practiced

cognitive behavioral ther-

apy, and began to turn a

corner. I eventually learned

to question irrationally

negative thoughts about

myself, the people I

encountered, the future.

Since then, my battles with

depression have become

winnable skirmishes.

As I was learning to

identify distortions in my

own thinking, I began to

recognize them in the

thinking of others. The or-

ganization I lead, the Foun-

dation for Individual Rights

in Education, supports free-

speech rights on campus.

One case that was much on

my mind had taken place

in the fall of 2007. At theUniversity of Delaware, as

part of a diversity-focused

orientation program, stu-

dents reported being made

to “take a stance” on one

side of a room or another,

displaying their personal

views on polarizing topics

such as affirmative action

and gay marriage—even if

they didn’t yet know where

they stood. Such an activity

is not only reductive and

unscholarly, it is a classic

demonstration of the all-

or-nothing thinking I had

struggled with.

The resident assistants

who implemented the pro-

gram had been given train-

ing materials that sought to

define racism, and included

statements such as “the

term [racist] applies to all

white people” living in the

United States” and “people

of color cannot be racists.”While such claims may be

good topics for debate, they

seem on their face to be

examples of several classic

cognitive distortions—

overgeneralizing, dichoto-

mous thinking, and an

inability to disconfirm.

Campus leaders seemed

to be telling students that

they should overgeneralize,

personalize, and magnify

problems.

I began to wonder

whether campus cul-

ture, more generally, was

coaxing students toward

distorted thinking. And I

began to wonder whether

distorted thinking patterns

were not only interfering

with truth-seeking, but also

perhaps leading to a wors-

ening of student mental

health. I took this question

to my friend, the social psy-

chologist Jonathan Haidt.

Illustration by Hieronymous


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or a fellow student is unwelcome, and therefore grounds fora harassment claim. Emotional reasoning is now acceptedas evidence.

If our universities are teaching students that their emotionscan be used effectively as weapons—or at least as evidence inadministrative proceedings—then they are teaching studentsto nurture a kind of hypersensitivity that will lead them intocountless drawn-out conflicts in college and beyond. Schoolsmay be training students in thinking styles that will damage

their careers and friendships, along with their mental health.

Fortune-Telling and Trigger Warnings

Burns defines fortune-telling as “anticipat[ing] that things willturn out badly” and feeling “convinced that your predictionis an already-established fact.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinndefine it as “predict[ing] the future negatively” or seeing po-tential danger in an everyday situation. The recent spread ofdemands for trigger warnings on reading assignments withprovocative content is an example of fortune-telling.

The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) cantrigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear

that it may be repeated—has been around at least since WorldWar I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is

now called post-traumatic stress disorder. But explicit triggerwarnings are believed to have originated much more recently,on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Triggerwarnings became particularly prevalent in self-help and fem-inist forums, where they allowed readers who had sufferedfrom traumatic events like sexual assault to avoid graphiccontent that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstreamuse online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campusappears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly over-night, students at universities across the country have begundemanding that their professors issue warnings before cover-

ing material that might evoke a negative emotional response.In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students,

recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College,in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (sub-sequently retracted in the face of faculty pushback) thatincluded a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. Thesetopics included classism and privilege, among many others.The task force recommended that materials that might trig-ger negative reactions among students be avoided altogetherunless they “contribute directly” to course goals, and sug-gested that works that were “too important to avoid” be madeoptional.

It’s hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism andprivilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror that

is typically implicated in PTSD. Rather, trigger warnings aresometimes demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudesthat some students find politically offensive, in the name ofpreventing other students from being harmed. This is an ex-ample of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—wespontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we wantto support. Once you find something hateful, it is easy to ar-gue that exposure to the hateful thing could traumatize someother people. You believe that you know how others will react,

and that their reaction could be devastating. Preventing thatdevastation becomes a moral obligation for the whole com-munity. Books for which students have called publicly for trig-ger warnings within the past couple of years include VirginiaWoolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (at Rutgers, for “suicidal inclinations”)and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (at Columbia, for sexual assault).

Jeannie Suk’s New Yorker essay described the difficultiesof teaching rape law in the age of trigger warnings. Somestudents, she wrote, have pressured their professors to avoidteaching the subject in order to protect themselves andtheir classmates from potential distress. Suk compares thisto trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a

surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he seesor handles blood.”

However, there is a deeper problem with trigger warn-ings. According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, thevery idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid thethings they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in anelevator during a power outage may panic and think she isgoing to die. That frightening experience can change neuralconnections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia.If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you shouldhelp her avoid elevators.

But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you shouldtake your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a pro-cess known as exposure therapy. You might start by askingthe woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—

standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehensionbegins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s stand-ing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she willbegin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous.(This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.)Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer,and on later days to push the call button, and eventually tostep in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can getrewired again to associate a previously feared situation withsafety or normalcy.

Students who call for trigger warnings may be correct thatsome of their peers are harboring memories of trauma that

could be reactivated by course readings. But they are wrong totry to prevent such reactivations. Students with PTSD should


The new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and isaffecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis

for discussion or debate.


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of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid nor-mal life, with its many opportunities for habituation. Class-

room discussions are safe places to be exposed to incidentalreminders of trauma (such as the word violate). A discussionof violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so itis a good way to help students change the associations that arecausing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habitua-tion done in college, because the world beyond college will befar less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warningsand opt-outs.

The expansive use of trigger warnings may also foster un-healthy mental habits in the vastly larger group of studentswho do not suffer from PTSD or other anxiety disorders.People acquire their fears not just from their own past expe-riences, but from social learning as well. If everyone around

you acts as though something is dangerous—elevators, certainneighborhoods, novels depicting racism—then you are at riskof acquiring that fear too. The psychiatrist Sarah Roff pointedthis out last year in an online article for The Chronicle of Higher

Education. “One of my biggest concerns about trigger warn-ings,” Roff wrote, “is that they will apply not just to those whohave experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an at-mosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there issomething dangerous or damaging about discussing diffi cultaspects of our history.”

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, sevenhumanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning move-

ment was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teachingand pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving


2014, and just weeks later, I

started encountering these

issues in my own teaching

at New York University.

For example, to prepare

students for a class discus-

sion on wisdom, I assigned

a magazine article that de-

scribed the dilemmas a phy-

sician faced as one of hispatients was dying of can-

cer. A student complained

(in the homework assign-

ment) that I should have in-

cluded a trigger warning, so

that students who had lost

a relative to cancer could

steer clear of the article. In

another course, I lectured

on weakness of the will, and

I described Ulysses’s wise

leadership in tying himself

to the mast of his ship, so

he could resist the Sirens’

song. I showed a painting

of the scene in which the

Sirens try but fail to lure

Ulysses and his men to their

death. Like most mermaids,

the Sirens in the painting

are topless, and this led to

I HAVE STUDIED moral psy-

chology for 28 years. During

that time, the American

left and right have become

like different countries,perpetually at odds. Each

side has its own values, of

course, but increasingly

its own facts, too—about

history, economics, climate

science. In 2012, I published

my most recent book, The

Righteous Mind, in the

hope that if Americans

understood the biases that

affect their everyday moral

thinking, they might be able

to understand one another

better.

I recently became par-

ticularly alarmed by reports

about new moralistic trends

on college campuses. I

began reading about trig-

ger warnings and micro-

aggressions in the spring of

JonathanHaidt’sStory

a complaint (in my teach-

ing evaluations) that the

painting was degrading

to women, and that I was

insensitive for showing it.

Most of my students

are not so easily offended.

But the relationship of trust

between professors and

students seems to be

weakening as more stu-

dents become monitors for

microaggressions.

I don’t mind if students

complain directly to me.

Each lecture involves hun-

dreds of small decisions,

and sometimes I do choose

the wrong word or analogy.

But nowadays, e-mail and

social media make it easier

for students to complain di-

rectly to campus authorities,

or to the Internet at large,

than to come talk with their

professors. Each complaint

can lead to many rounds of

meetings, and sometimes

to formal charges and

investigations.Increasingly, professors

must ask themselves not

just What is the best way to

teach this material? but also

Might the most sensitive

student in the class take

offense if I say this, and then

post it online, and then ruin

my career?

I had been wondering

why things seemed to be

getting worse so quickly.

Then one day last year,

Greg Lukianoff came to

me with his diagnosis:

colleges themselves may

be inadvertently teaching

distorted thinking. I saw the

close connection to moral

psychology, and offered to

write this essay with him.

“phone calls from deans and other administrators investigat-ing student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’

material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trig-ger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that studentswill not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that ifthey do, a contract has been broken.” When students come toexpect trigger warnings for any material that makes them un-comfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble isto avoid material that might upset the most sensitive studentin the class.

Magnification, Labeling, andMicroaggressions

Burns defines magnification as “exaggerat[ing] the impor-tance of things,” and Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define

labeling as “assign[ing] global negative traits to yourself andothers.” The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedlyracist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory micro-aggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus onsmall or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students tofocus on them and then relabel the people who have madesuch remarks as aggressors.

The term microaggression originated in the 1970s and re-ferred to subtle, often unconscious racist affronts. The defi-nition has expanded in recent years to include anything thatcan be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis. Forexample, in 2013, a student group at UCLA staged a sit-in

during a class taught by Val Rust, an education professor. Thegroup read a letter aloud expressing their concerns about the

H I E R O

N Y M

O

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campus’s hostility toward students of color. Although Rustwas not explicitly named, the group quite clearly criticized histeaching as microaggressive. In the course of correcting hisstudents’ grammar and spelling, Rust had noted that a studenthad wrongly capitalized the first letter of the word indigenous.Lowercasing the capital I was an insult to the student and herideology, the group claimed.

Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an ag-gression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood,

a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical col-umn for a conservative student publication, The Michigan

Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency toperceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmoodwas also employed at the campus newspaper, The MichiganDaily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “sa-tirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributorsand minority communities on campus … created a conflict ofinterest.” The Daily terminated Mahmood after he describedthe incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The DailyCaller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s door-way with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such

as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speechcomes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protective-ness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

In March, the student government at Ithaca College, inupstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation ofan anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Studentsponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against

“oppressors” engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsorsof the program said that while “not … every instance will re-quire trial or some kind of harsh punishment,” she wanted theprogram to be “record-keeping but with impact.”

Surely people make subtle or thinly veiled racist or sexistremarks on college campuses, and it is right for students toraise questions and initiate discussions about such cases. Butthe increased focus on microaggressions coupled with the en-

dorsement of emotional reasoning is a formula for a constantstate of outrage, even toward well-meaning speakers trying toengage in genuine discussion.

What are we doing to our students if we encourage them todevelop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave thecocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Wouldthey not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them toquestion their own emotional reactions, and to give people thebenefit of the doubt?

Teaching Students to Catastrophize andHave Zero Tolerance

Burns deines catastrophizing as a kind of magniicationthat turns “commonplace negative events into nightmarish

monsters.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as believ-ing “that what has happened or will happen” is “so awful andunbearable that you won’t be able to stand it.” Requests fortrigger warnings involve catastrophizing, but this way of think-ing colors other areas of campus thought as well.

Catastrophizing rhetoric about physical danger is em-ployed by campus administrators more commonly than youmight think—sometimes, it seems, with cynical ends in mind.For instance, last year administrators at Bergen Community

College, in New Jersey, suspended Francis Schmidt, a profes-sor, after he posted a picture of his daughter on his Google+account. The photo showed her in a yoga pose, wearing a T-shirt that read ,a quote from the HBO show Game of Thrones. Schmidt hadfiled a grievance against the school about two months earlierafter being passed over for a sabbatical. The quote was inter-preted as a threat by a campus administrator, who receiveda notification after Schmidt posted the picture; it had beensent, automatically, to a whole group of contacts. Accordingto Schmidt, a Bergen security official present at a subsequentmeeting between administrators and Schmidt thought the

word fire could refer to AK-47s.Then there is the eight-year legal saga at Valdosta State

University, in Georgia, where a student was expelled for

protesting the construction of a parking garage by postingan allegedly “threatening” collage on Facebook. The collagedescribed the proposed structure as a “memorial” parkinggarage—a joke referring to a claim by the university presidentthat the garage would be part of his legacy. The presidentinterpreted the collage as a threat against his life.

It should be no surprise that students are exhibiting simi-lar sensitivity. At the University of Central Florida in 2013, forexample, Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was sus-pended after a student reported that Jung had made a threat-ening comment during a review session. Jung explained tothe Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was

difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces,so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suf-focated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on akilling spree or what?”

After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group ofnearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explain-ing that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Never-theless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties anddemanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] orto the university community” before he would be allowed toreturn to campus.

All of these actions teach a common lesson: smart peopledo, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains

What are we doing to our students if weencourage them to develop extra-thin skin just before

they leave the cocoon of adult protection?


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out of molehills, and seekpunishment for anyonewhose words make anyoneelse feel uncomfortable.

Mental Filteringand DisinvitationSeasonAs Burns deines it, mental

iltering is “pick[ing] out anegative detail in any situ-ation and dwell[ing] on itexclusively, thus perceivingthat the whole situation isnegative.” Leahy, Holland,and McGinn refer to this as

“negative iltering,” whichthey define as “focus[ing] al-most exclusively on the nega-tives and seldom notic[ing]the positives.” When applied

to campus life, mental filter-ing allows for simplemindeddemonization.

Students and facultymembers in large numbersmodeled this cognitive dis-tortion during 2014’s “dis-invitation season.” That’sthe time of year—usuallyearly spring—when com-mencement speakers are an-nounced and when students

and professors demand thatsome of those speakers bedisinvited because of thingsthey have said or done. Ac-cording to data compiled bythe Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000,at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universi-ties to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events;most of them have occurred since 2009.

Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targetsof 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice andthe International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Chris-tine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state;

Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of aG8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speak-ers could have been seen as highly successful role models forfemale students, and Rice for minority students as well. Butthe critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of somethingpositive coming from those speeches.

Members of an academic community should of course befree to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or tolook skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of part of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing herperspectives?

If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be

pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaningcampus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a

yourself and others. “I’m

undesirable,” or “He’s a

rotten person.”

5. Discounting positives.

You claim that the positive

things you or others do are

trivial. “That’s what wives

are supposed to do—so it

doesn’t count when she’snice to me,” or “Those suc-

cesses were easy, so they

don’t matter.”

6. Negative filtering. You

focus almost exclusively on

the negatives and seldom

notice the positives. “Look

at all of the people who

don’t like me.”

7. Overgeneralizing.

You perceive a global

pattern of negatives on the

basis of a single incident.

“This generally happens to

me. I seem to fail at a lot

of things.”

8. Dichotomous thinking.

You view events or people

in all-or-nothing terms. “I

get rejected by everyone,”

or “It was a complete waste

of time.”

9. Blaming. You focus on

the other person as the

further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creationof an environment in which students rarely encounter diverseviewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the beliefthat it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduatebelieving that they can learn nothing from people they dislikeor from those with whom they disagree, we will have donethem a great intellectual disservice.

What Can We Do Now?Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and peoplethat might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for thestudents. They are bad for the workplace, which will be miredin unending litigation if student expectations of safety arecarried forward. And they are bad for American democracy,which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. Whenthe ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not justas wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims,it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation,and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.

Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideasthat they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they

source of your negative

feelings, and you refuse

to take responsibility for

changing yourself. “She’s

to blame for the way I

feel now,” or “My parents

caused all my problems.”

10. What if? You keep ask-

ing a series of questionsabout “what if” something

happens, and you fail to

be satisfied with any of the

answers. “Yeah, but what if

I get anxious?,” or “What if I

can’t catch my breath?”

11. Emotional reason-

ing. You let your feelings

guide your interpretation

of reality. “I feel depressed;

therefore, my marriage is

not working out.”

12. Inability to disconfirm.

You reject any evidence

or arguments that might

contradict your negative

thoughts. For example,

when you have the thought

I’m unlovable, you reject

as irrelevant any evidence

that people like you. Con-

sequently, your thought

cannot be refuted. “That’s

not the real issue. There

are deeper problems.

There are other factors.”

CommonCognitiveDistortions

A partial list from

Robert L. Leahy, Stephen

J. F. Holland, and Lata

K. McGinn’s Treatment

Plans and Interventions forDepression and Anxiety

Disorders (2012).

1. Mind reading. You

assume that you know

what people think without

having sufficient evidence

of their thoughts. “He

thinks I’m a loser.”

2. Fortune-telling.

You predict the future

negatively: things will get

worse, or there is danger

ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,”

or “I won’t get the job.”

3. Catastrophizing.

You believe that what

has happened or will

happen will be so awful

and unbearable that you

won’t be able to stand it.

“It would be terrible if I

failed.”

4. Labeling. You assign

global negative traits to

R E P R

I N T E D

W

I T H

P E R M I S S I O N

F R O M

G U I L F O R D

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Thomas Jefferson, upon founding the University ofVirginia, said:

This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the

human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wher-ever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason isleft free to combat it.

We believe that this is still—and will always be—the bestattitude for American universities. Faculty, administrators,students, and the federal government all have a role to play inrestoring universities to their historic mission.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the author of UnlearningLiberty. Jonathan Haidt is a professor in the Business andSociety Program at New York University’s Stern School of

Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and TheHappiness Hypothesis.

can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideasthat they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Bud-dhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions)is that you can never achieve happiness by making the worldconform to your desires. But you can master your desiresand habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitivebehavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some stepsthat might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus.

The biggest single step in the right direction does not

involve faculty or university administrators, but rather thefederal government, which should release universitiesfrom their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctionsby the Department of Education. Congress should definepeer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’sdefinition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of

Education. The Davis standard holds that a single commentor thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harass-ment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensivebehavior by one student that interferes with another stu-dent’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standardwould help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their

students’ speech so carefully.Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness

about the need to balance freedom of speech with the needto make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about suchconflicting but important values is just the sort of challengingexercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learnto do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned.

Universities should also officially and strongly discouragetrigger warnings. They should endorse the American Associa-tion of University Professors’ report on these warnings, whichnotes, “The presumption that students need to be protectedrather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizingand anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use triggerwarnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discour-aging the practice, universities would help fortify the facultyagainst student requests for such warnings.

Finally, universities should rethink the skills and valuesthey most want to impart to their incoming students. At pres-ent, many freshman-orientation programs try to raise studentsensitivity to a nearly impossible level. Teaching students toavoid giving unintentional offense is a worthy goal, especiallywhen the students come from many different cultural back-grounds. But students should also be taught how to live ina world full of potential offenses. Why not teach incomingstudents how to practice cognitive behavioral therapy? Given

high and rising rates of mental illness, this simple step wouldbe among the most humane and supportive things a univer-sity could do. The cost and time commitment could be keptlow: a few group training sessions could be supplemented byWeb sites or apps. But the outcome could pay dividends inmany ways. For example, a shared vocabulary about reason-ing, common distortions, and the appropriate use of evidenceto draw conclusions would facilitate critical thinking and realdebate. It would also tone down the perpetual state of out-rage that seems to engulf some colleges these days, allowingstudents’ minds to open more widely to new ideas and newpeople. A greater commitment to formal, public debate on

campus—and to the assembly of a more politically diversefaculty—would further serve that goal.

D U E D I L I G E N C E

They didn’t do their due diligence.

They didn’t do it,

And now they rue it,

And how they will rue not doing it

With vigilance when they had the chance.

They talked the talk but didn’t dance the dance.

They committed the folly

Of failing to follow the lolly.

They didn’t learn about the booze,

They didn’t learn about the flooze,

The smack, the jack, and the lolly.

And, in short, they missed the trolley.

They overlooked some obvious flaws.

Why? Was it arrogance

Or the need to spare the expense

Or just a lack of common sense?

Who can say? Whatever the cause,

They failed to observe the clause.


They didn’t do it,

And now they rue it,

And how they will rue not doing it,

How they will rue the day


— David Lehman

David Lehman is the author, most recently, of The Stateof the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988–2014. His new book, Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes onthe Man and His World , will be published in October.


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C o p y r i g h t o f A t l a n t i c i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f A t l a n t i c M e d i a C o m p a n y a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e

c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s

e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r

i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

Documents

The Coddling of the American Mind